Faculty and Research

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse. He returned to Oxford in 1992 to become Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College, a post he held until 2000, when he was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford. Two years later he left for the United States to take up the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, before moving to Harvard in 2004.

His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller.

In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. 2001 saw the appearance of The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (Basic), written after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

Niall Ferguson is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic Books), was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (Penguin), was published in 2004 and was the basis for a two-hour documentary for Channel 4. In 2006 he published The War of the World, a history of twentieth-century conflict, which was also featured on Channel 4 and PBS.

Niall Ferguson’s most recent book and television series is The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin), which appeared in November 2008. He is currently completing a biography of Siegmund Warburg and has recently begun researching a life of Henry Kissinger.

A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson is a contributing editor for the Financial Times. In addition, he is a senior adviser to GLG Partners.